A Survivor 50 Player Just Went Off About Her Lack Of Screentime

The reaction to Survivor 50 thus far has been extremely positive, at least apart from two glaring issues. Fans weren’t happy about how much time Zac Brown was given during his reward, and they’ve not been happy about the lack of screentime for some of the castaways, in particular many of the women. We haven’t gotten a ton of player comments on the Zac Brown of it all, but for the first time this season, we do have one player going off about her edit.

Through five episodes, Chrissy Hofbeck has only gotten five total confessionals, and she is not a happy castaway about it. After getting straight up zero this week for the second time, she took to social media to let everyone know she’s not happy about how she’s being edited. More than that, she’s not happy about how the women are collectively being edited. She dropped a series of tweets, calling out the show for giving the so-called purple edit to more women than men over the years. She called this season “In The Hands Of The Bros” and said she’s not actually on Survivor, she’s on vacation.

In addition to her own comments, Chrissy also retweeted a handful of fans who complained about the edit. She retweeted one calling out how many times women have gotten zero confessionals versus men and another complaining about how she’s not in Coach’s warrior alliance when she’s an all-time challenge beast. Altogether, it’s pretty clear she’s not happy about how this season is going, at least from an edit perspective.

All of the recent Survivor seasons have started with 18 players, but on 50, we started with 24 players. Fans knew that was going to cost some castaways screentime and potentially lead to people being unedited, but I’m not sure anyone saw how much it was going to affect in particular the women. There are five players remaining in the game who have gotten less than 10 confessionals. Four of those are women. Nine different players have had at least one episode without a confessional. Seven of those are women. There’s clearly a pattern.

Chrissy’s specific edit on the show has been all over the board. During one episode, she got a really prominent storyline talking about the medical challenges she’s overcome since her last appearance and how much she struggles to connect with people on the island. The segment felt like such strong character building that it led some analysts to cite her as a possible darkhorse winner. In many of the other episodes, however, she’s been a background character, despite playing a prominent role in several challenges.

I love talking about how the show is edited, but personally, I’m going to wait to make any grand comments, especially about sexism, until I see the rest of the season. Emily, Genevieve, Cirie, Aubry and Stephenie have all been very prominent or semi-prominent characters through the first five episodes, and I think it’s possible some of the men who have been overexposed are going to go home shortly, which would explain why they’ve gotten so much content so far. That would pave the way for some of the underedited female players to take a really major role in the post-merge edit. Or it it’s possible it’ll all continue like this, and we’ll end the season wondering why Survivor 50 was fully in the hands of the bros, as Chrissy said. We’ll see.

You can catch new episodes of Survivor on Wednesday evenings on CBS. You can also stream on Paramount+.